Journalstone's 2010 Warped Words for Twisted Minds (15 page)

“Wh . . . where am I?”

Her voice sounded as if it were coming from the end of an infinitely long tunnel and only the stabs of pain that accompanied the movement of her jaws convinced her that it was her own.

“The Garden. You're safe now.”

Something about his tone sounded almost apologetic or as if he were trying to convince himself of his own statement.

She closed her eyes for a second and was suddenly back on the hillside. She saw Jeremy and Mama lying in the grass, their blood mingling in a collective pool below them. Unmoving. Silent. Dead.

Her eyes snapped open and, even though it hurt like hell to do so, her brow furrowed as she glared at the man on the other side of the door.

“You bastard. What they hell have you done? What the fuck . . . .”

But then she was sobbing, her back heaving with tears as her fingers pressed against her temples and bubbles of snot erupted from her nostrils.

“I'm . . . I'm sorry. It had to be done. For the good of all. For . . . humanity. See? There's a greater good. A higher purpose. But for what it's worth . . . I am sorry.”

That was the last time she'd ever seen Donnely. In the beginning, she'd entertained fantasies of him returning in the middle of the night. She’d had dreams of keys rattling in the lock and the door swinging open to reveal him silhouetted by torchlight, ready to whisk her away from this place and make amends for the evil he'd brought upon her.

But that was so long ago, and she now knew he would never return. On some level, he probably did feel bad for his part in what had happened. But she couldn't help but remember the look in his eyes as he'd described the work done here. She’d rightfully identified it as the passion of a true believer. Any guilt that kept him awake at night was undoubtedly overshadowed by the zeal of his belief.

The door to her cell swung open, and two men shuffled inside. This morning it was the ones she thought of as Fred and Barney, which meant that Larry and Curly would be making the evening rounds.

Barney glanced down at the clipboard he held in his hands and thumbed through the pages with bored detachment.

“Says here her last period was two weeks ago.”

Fred nodded and propped his sawed-off broomstick against the wall.

“Assume the position, Hips.”

In the beginning, she'd fought. She'd scratched and bit and kicked and ripped out clumps of hair. She'd been beaten until it hurt to take a breath, had been held down and forced to take part in the routine no matter how much she squirmed and writhed. She'd had breakfast and dinner withheld. Even though it was the temperature and consistency of warm puke, it was still food . . . and she'd gotten tired. She was so tired of the purple and green bruises, of trying to sleep when it felt as though her ribs had been kicked by a wild mule. No matter how hard she fought the result was always the same.

Donnely had been right – it was much easier just to cooperate.

And so it was that she closed her eyes, bent over in a wide-legged stance, and gripped her ankles. She imagined that she was back in her little apartment, Lady Gaga was on the radio, and Jeremy was bitching about some cock-knocking camper who'd just picked him off three times in a row. Outside, an ice cream truck called to children with its pied piper jingle, and the scent of curry drifted from the Singh's apartment next door.

She tried not to let the cold glass of the rectal thermometer shatter the illusion as it invaded her body, tried to convince herself that she was only gritting her teeth because Jeremy had launched into another curse-laden tirade against the sniper who'd become the bane of his existence.

The DJ on the radio was calling for sunny skies with a 10 percent chance of precipitation. But then his voice melded with Barney's nasal whine as she felt the thermometer glide out of her most secret of places. “Congratulations, Hips . . . you're ovulating.”

She heard one of them crossing the room, cursing beneath his breath as he picked up the waste bucket with a slosh.

“Hard to believe someone so pretty can smell so damn bad. Shit.”

She kept her eyes closed as she stood upright, continued envisioning her apartment, the potted plant by the door, the opening notes of The Entertainer as her cell phone lit up with Mama's number.

It had been Fred complaining about the bucket. Which meant Barney was currently bringing in the gruel that passed as breakfast. As if on cue, the smell of the meat and vegetable slop overpowered the curry of her dream world.

“Eat up, Hips. You're gonna need your energy.”

They both laughed as if they'd heard the joke the DJ had just made about lesbians, potpourri, and open cans of tuna. Then her door creaked shut, there was the click of the lock, footsteps, and the entire scene replayed itself in Scar's cell.

She bit her bottom lip and tried to take a long, slow breath. But the air seemed to stick somewhere in the back of her throat.

Ovulation.

She knew what that meant. Within an hour, there would be a stream of men coming through her cell. Each one would have his way with her. Each one would fill her with millions of tiny swimmers, some of which were destined to trickle down thighs that would soon feel raw and stingy. For the next few days, she would know practically every man in The Garden. multiple times. Some would border on brutality with their savage thrusts and the twisting of her nipples. Others would behave as if this were simply another chore, no different than cooking the slop or slaughtering the cats which went into it. A select few would be shy and apologetic, each telling her that she had to understand that there was a greater good.

They had to repopulate the world after all. They had to outnumber the dead. They had to have children who would grow into soldiers. They had to keep the gene pool as diverse as possible.

Within a few months, her fate would be decided. If their seed didn't take purchase, if her belly didn't begin to balloon out and her monthly flow come to end, then she would be declared barren. She didn't know exactly how it would be done, but the end result would be the same. She would end up on the other side of this cell, in the darkness with the other rotters, just another subject for The Tree of Life to experiment on.

She opened her eyes and saw their hands reaching through the bars of the wall's window. Flaky skin, some deteriorated to the point that strands of muscle could be seen beneath patches that had been eaten away by time. They grabbed and grasped with mindless enthusiasm, seeking purchase that would never come.

But the living would come. And come. And come.

To them, she was nothing more than an incubator, just another breeder in a long row of nameless women.

She walked over to the hands, keeping just out of reach and inciting them into a frenzy with her presence.

Those men had killed Jeremy. They had killed Mama.

They'd locked her up and humiliated her on a daily basis. They raped her countless times all in the name of procreation.

And they'd kill her, too, if she didn't produce a child soon. But what if she did? Nine months of respite? Nine months of being in the maternity wing before being transported back to this dingy cell? Wouldn't it be worse then? Knowing that there was better food, more comfortable quarters with no chance of beatings for fear of damaging the fetus? It would all begin again – the daily inspections, assuming the position, the monthly violations.

The hands were so close that she could see the little black specks beneath what was left of the fingernails. They clutched at the air, seeming to squeeze invisible stress balls with sheer abandon.

Even now Donnely, and others like him, were probably out there, scouring the countryside. They searched for fresh stock – for new victims, for more women to defile.

How long would this go on?

“No more.”

Her voice was a soft whisper but was filled with more resolve than the loudest shout. She could still fight back. She could bring the entire Garden crumbling down, could utterly destroy all they'd worked so hard to build. And it would serve the bastards right.

She extended her hand quickly before she had a chance to lose her nerve. Thrusting it into the darkness, through the bars on the little windows, squeezing her eyes shut.

It didn't hurt as badly as she thought it would. The bite was quick and felt no different, really, than the time she'd been nipped by the neighbor's Chow as a kid. Wrestling her arm free from the rotter's weak grasp she immediately wrapped the open wound in the hem of her dirty smock and applied pressure. Blood blossomed on the fabric like a rose in a dirty field of snow, but it had been nothing more than a flesh wound. Within 15 minutes, the blood had clotted, and she licked the iron tasting flecks from the tip of her finger. If anyone bothered to ask, she's simply say she'd jabbed a splinter from the door into it. But no one would. She knew this as surely as she knew the contagion was flowing through her veins, poisoning her healthy cells with the infection of the walking dead.

“Bring it on, fuckers!” She shouted so loudly that her vocal cords felt strained with the words. “Bring it fucking on!”

At the same time she heard another voice, this one echoing through the corridors of her mind instead of the hallway with its series of cells and captives. It was Donnely’s voice, culled from her memory.

“Did you know that any exchange of bodily fluids will do the same damn thing? You kiss someone who's infected, for example, and get even the smallest amount of spit in your mouth, and you're done for.”

So let them come. Let the parade of rapists begin. She would spread her legs and would welcome them into her body. She would take every single man in the colony if they sent him. She would exchange bodily fluids with each and every one and let them have their way.

She would have her revenge.

From down the hall she heard a door swing open. She heard a male voice doing an off-key rendition of Snoop Dogg's Sexual Seduction.

Laying back on her sleeping bag, she closed her eyes and waited for him to enter her cell.

“My name is Alejandra,” she whispered.

“My name is Alejandra.”

Bianca Butler loved fairy tales, and Snow White had a special place in her heart. The image of a girl with skin pale as snow, hair black as ebony, and lips red as roses was so romantic she’d been captivated by it since childhood. When she married her prince (a handsome Wall Street banker named Jeffrey) and became pregnant, she went to bed every night praying for a child like Snow White.

White skin…black hair…red lips…Oh, the romance! The beauty! The purity of such a child! Bianca went to sleep at night and dreamed of a little girl dancing through newly fallen snow, thick black curls up in pigtails and bouncing merrily round her rosy cheeks as she giggled and spun around.

When her child came into the world nine months later, it was mostly what Bianca had wished for: its hair was black as ebony, and its skin white as snow. Only two tiny details were off.

First, it was not the child’s lips, but its eyes that shone red. Though they normally looked brown, in certain lighting a red sheen would glint around the edges of the iris. Bianca didn't admit it aloud, but she never wanted to meet her child alone in a dark alley.

The second aberration was the child’s gender. Rather than the beautiful girl Bianca had hoped for, she gave birth to a beautiful boy.

And he was beautiful. Though neither Bianca nor her husband Jeffrey had any interest in the name Angelo before seeing their child, they both agreed no other could fit him once they’d seen his face. Bianca quickly learned to expect (and enjoy) the comment, “My God, he looks like an angel!” from anyone seeing him for the first time. She took pleasure in their expressions when she said they'd guessed his name. Those exclamations remained an almost weekly occurrence throughout her shortened life.

Angelo was an unusual child, so calm that Bianca wondered at first if he had some sort of disorder. He neither cried nor smiled, but instead let his red-tinted eyes wander around any space he occupied, as though memorizing every crack in a wall, every cloud in the sky, every feature on a person’s face. He made no sound, no coos or cries.

Bianca rarely saw her husband, but one night when he came home from work early for the first time in four months, she seized the opportunity to talk about how unsettled Angelo made her feel.

“I don't think he's normal, Jeffrey,” she whispered. Angelo couldn't understand words yet, and was asleep in his room. But Bianca felt she needed to keep her voice low. Somehow she knew he heard every word she said and forgot nothing.

Jeffrey looked at her incredulously from the other side of their kitchen table, a forkful of roast beef halfway to his mouth.

“We're alone for the first time in months, and that's what you want to talk about?”

He never returned home early again. Bianca knew Jeffrey meant his absence to be punishment for not paying more attention to him, but she wondered if he had another reason for staying away. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, did Jeffrey fear their son, too?

When he was 1 year old, Bianca put Angelo into the bathtub without realizing the water was scalding until she touched it herself. Angelo hadn’t let a sound pass his lips, but sat motionless in the water as his skin turned red. By the time Bianca lifted him out, crying apologies and desperately trying to remember First Aid training for burns, blisters were raising on his pale flesh.

Angelo stared at his mother as she called her doctor and drove him to the Emergency Room. His eyes flickered from brown to red to brown again as Bianca's little Toyota sped under street lights that lit up the car one second and left it in darkness the next. In the ER, as the doctor spread ointment on his flesh, he acted the same. He just stared until Bianca wanted to run away so she never had to see those huge, penetrating eyes again.

I'm watching you, those eyes told her. I know who you are.

One evening when Angelo was 2 years old, Bianca was cutting carrots to use for dinner soup. She turned to grab a kitchen towel with the knife held loosely in her hand when she saw Angelo in the doorway. He stood shaded in the darkness of the hall, red eyes shining like two bloody wounds. Bianca screamed, sure some wild beast had come to rip her throat out. When she swung her arm up to defend herself, she felt pain as the knife sliced into her right thigh.

The sight of the blood seemed to fascinate Angelo, and he walked toward his mother in steps much too composed for a toddler. Bianca looked at her son and couldn’t move, her chest heaving with suppressed, panicked sobs. It was her son approaching her, she could see that now. Why was she still so frightened?

Angelo had been able to use individual words, even a few simple sentences, for quite some time, but he said nothing as he bore down on Bianca.

When he dug his chubby fingers into the cut in her thigh and brought the blood to his mouth, licking it like some exotic delicacy to be savored, she knew why her fear refused to go away.

After that day she often spotted Angelo hiding in shadow around the house, gazing at her as though waiting for something, those red, red eyes following her movements. Sometimes she looked at him, and he'd just wave at her unabashedly. Other times she'd see him from the corner of her eye and turn to get a better look, only to find he'd disappeared.

Firmly, she ordered herself not to think about it, because after all, Angelo hadn't hurt her. You're acting hysterical over nothing, she told herself. Stop it.

When Angelo was 3 years old, Bianca gave birth to her second son. She hadn't intended to have any more children, but then came that night when Jeffrey stumbled in at two in the morning, drunk and glaring at her so intensely she hadn't dared to protest. God, how he had smelled! With his hair tangled like barbed wire and his clothes a wrinkled mess, a bottle of Jack Daniels in his hand with half its contents slopped down his front, Jeffrey had looked like a psychopath escaped from some slasher movie come to take her life.

Firmly against abortion as Bianca stood, she refused to terminate the resultant pregnancy. Nine months later Caleb popped out and proved to be as beautiful as his brother with that same black hair and pale skin, though his eyes were a normal shade of brown. Caleb’s behavior also proved different from Angelo’s. Upon being taken from the womb and slapped, he started to cry, and then settled contentedly when placed in his mother’s arms. Bianca was surprised to hear this was normal baby behavior; when he'd begun crying, she'd almost stopped breathing in shock. She’d forgotten what a child's cries sounded like.

Bianca was more than a little worried about bringing Baby Caleb home. Her eldest son frightened her, really frightened her, though she denied this to herself on a conscious level. One wasn’t afraid of their own children – that wasn’t how the fairy tale she'd promised herself she'd live was meant to go.

Angelo’s reaction was a relief. When Bianca sat down on the living room couch and, using all her will power to show no fear, invited Angelo to sit next to her and meet his baby brother, Angelo began to study Caleb’s face intently.

“Let me hold him,” Angelo said. His sentences were remarkably well formed for his age, making him sound adult. Bianca had never been inspired to try baby talk.

“Ah, I think you’re a little too small to support his head properly, dear.”

A small crease appeared between Angelo’s black eyebrows, the closest he'd ever gotten to showing upset feelings. A bolt of fear made Bianca shudder; quickly trying to ease him, she said, “Why don’t you hold his hand instead? Here, look, your brother wants to say hello!”

Angelo reached out with caution that was far more mature than his years. When Caleb’s tiny fingers closed around his own, Bianca was amazed to see the first smile that had ever crossed Angelo’s lips.

“He’s perfect,” Angelo said. The look in his eyes threw Bianca back to a year ago in her kitchen, and she wondered why his expression now should remind her of the predatory way he had tasted her blood.

She pushed the thought away. She had a perfect family. She had her manly prince of a husband, and now two beautiful children who loved each other. This was exactly the way her life was supposed to turn out.

Angelo and Caleb grew up close; closer, in fact, than Bianca had known brothers could be. The usual sibling rivalry and childish tantrums simply didn’t occur between them. Angelo was a kind, patient guide, and Caleb an adoring, faithful follower. Bianca worried sometimes about just how devoted Caleb acted and how easily he believed anything that came out of Angelo’s mouth. But she decided to believe that was just the way children behaved. Goodness knew some of the silly things she'd accepted as true when she was their age.

Sometimes Bianca would wake up to check on her sons and find Angelo standing by his brother's bed, staring down at Caleb and gently stroking his cheeks or forehead. Once, when he caught his mother looking, his gaze came sharply up, and Bianca knew without words that she'd been told to get out.

She got out. Everything was fine, she told herself as she hurried back to bed. Perhaps Angelo fixated on his brother a bit more than a normal sibling would, but that just meant Angelo loved Caleb more deeply than most little boys were capable of loving. There was nothing to worry about.

How strange, Bianca thought as she reached her room. I'm shivering, and yet it's so warm out.

When Caleb grew old enough to walk, Angelo began taking him on all day expeditions around the neighborhood. He told Bianca that he wanted to show Caleb the world, to introduce him to the unique way Angelo saw things since Caleb lacked his powers of observation. Bianca asked where they went, and Angelo became vague. Here and there.

Nothing wrong with that, Bianca told herself. After all, Angelo was such a bright boy. Why shouldn’t Caleb get the benefit of his elder brother’s experience?

Angelo didn’t have any friends, and for the life of her Bianca couldn’t understand why. He was handsome, polite, and intelligent. Even anti-social people tended to have somebody, someone, anyone. Why did Angelo never so much as mention a single person except Caleb in an affectionate way?

He hit puberty and his beauty began to mature, attracting stares from people of both genders and all ages. This made Bianca nervous, but Angelo showed no more interest in any of his would-be admirers than he did in playmates. That made his mother nervous in a whole different way.

“Angelo,” she asked him when his 15th birthday drew close, “Who do you want to invite for your birthday party?”

He looked startled, as he hadn’t had a birthday party in 10 years, nor shown any interest in one. Bianca hoped he didn’t realize she only asked to find out who his friends were.

“Just Caleb,” he said after a moment. Then he turned away from her as though he couldn't be bothered to think about the question any longer, or the woman who had asked it.

Bianca frowned as he prepared to leave the house. “No one else?” she asked.

“No. No one else.”

Bianca wondered if she should go after him and ask again, but then she told herself not to read too much into his solitude. Sometimes when two people became very close like Angelo and Caleb, they didn’t pay attention to others around them for a while. Angelo would have friends when he was ready.

Soon after, Caleb brought home a friend for the first time, a cheerful boy named Mark from school. The two boys spent the afternoon playing video games on the floor of the Butler living room, squealing with laughter as they tried to outrace and outfight each other on the small screen of the Butler’s flat panel Sony TV.

When Angelo came home and saw his brother with Mark, he froze in the doorway.

Bianca, who’d stood in the kitchen at the time, later convinced herself she hadn't seen what she thought she'd seen. She told herself that she'd been quite far away from Angelo and hadn't gotten a good look at his expression. How silly could she be, to think that such naked hatred and jealousy would ever appear on Angelo's face! Why, he barely showed any expression at all, usually. He'd only smile or frown once every other month or so.

Yet Bianca couldn't shake off her uneasiness. It was normal for siblings and good friends to feel some measure of possessiveness, but that look had been beyond anything Bianca had ever seen in real life. Stronger even than the look her first boyfriend had given her when he'd found her in an empty classroom at school with another boy's hand up her blouse in 9th grade.

It doesn't matter, Bianca told herself firmly. It doesn't matter because I didn't see what I thought I saw. Angelo never gave Caleb that look. I made a mistake.

About a week later Mark left his house to go to school and never made it there. No trace of him, not a scrap of cloth nor a lock of hair, was ever found.

The night Mark's parents announced him missing by hysterically calling everyone they knew, Bianca watched Angelo console the distraught Caleb and told herself over and over again that he couldn’t have had anything to do with Mark’s vanishing. She tried to focus on the compassion Angelo showed, the way he held his brother close and stroked his hair and back, and told herself that Angelo was indeed an angel, her angel. No angel would do such a heinous thing as murder a child.

For all she knew Mark fell into a ditch somewhere, and no person had done anything to him. Yes, that made sense. Mark had been gangly, all elbows and huge feet, and hadn't struck Bianca as very bright. It had to be Mark's own stupidity and clumsiness that was at fault, not her son.

Caleb buried his tear-stained face into Angelo's chest, and for a second, Bianca saw her elder son's mouth curve into a smile. Disquiet washed over her, scattering her fragile surety — had that smile been as triumphant as it looked? But no, no, Angelo was just smiling because Caleb had finally stopped crying. Her perfect son would never do anything…inappropriate.

Caleb never brought home another friend.

Some nights, when Bianca couldn't sleep, she heard panting and groaning from the brothers’ room. They were passionate sounds that she faintly recognized as sexual, even though she and Jeffrey hadn’t been intimate since conceiving Caleb. There were whispers in the dark, soft sounds that Bianca could have passed off as talking except that gasping always followed. She heard huffing and bed springs squeaking, and little whimpers and pleas that cut through the night air.